Three Hits and a Miss at One-Act Festival

The 7th Annual One Act Festival at Theatre 40 has some pretty big shoes to fill. Last year’s outing featured four uncommonly strong scripts with impeccable direction and performances.

This year proves neither triumph nor disaster. While disappointing compared to last year’s effort, the new version offers one very good playlet, two fairly solid titles and only one dud.

The best is the last, Garry Williams’ “Rain,” which begins with a drizzle of dialogue and builds to a flood of emotion. A farmer named Staff (Stephen Tobolowsky) is suffering a crisis of faith shortly after being paralyzed in a fall. As he sits on the porch in his wheelchair, awaiting the end of a crop-killing drought, he confides his doubts about God and life to his religious wife (Ann Hearn), retarded son (Jason Horst) and teenage daughter (Stacey Stone).

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This could easily have turned into a maudlin, pretentious exercise, but Williams mixes Staff’s down-home philosophizing with a healthy dose of skepticism and sarcasm. As directed by Michael Peretzian, the production also benefits enormously from Tobolowsky’s wry, intense performance.

Bill Bozzone’s agreeable comedy “Sonny DeRee’s Life Flashes Before His Eyes” is a model of efficient playwriting. About to be dispatched over a $9,000 debt by a chain-saw-wielding hit man (Gavin Glennon), bookie Sonny (Christopher Michael Moore) gets a last-minute reprieve from his estranged mother (Bea Silvern). She offers to pay the money and save her son’s life, so long as he indulges her fantasies of a happy domestic past.

There’s little surprising or original here, though Bozzone and director Billy Hayes have a good sense of pungent detail (before revving up his chain saw, Glennon slips into a black hooded poncho). Brassy Silvern and bearish Moore make a winning pair.

Mary Steelsmith’s “Bedside Companion” is more troubling and problematic. Charlie (Jonathan Read), a popular singer hospitalized with an AIDS-related illness, is torn between caretakers Rose (Elizabeth Meads), a prim realist, and the exuberant dreamer Jojo (Teresa Gilmore).

As directed by Andre Barron, the play treads the same tricky line between morbidity and mirth seen in Scott McPherson’s “Marvin’s Room.” But here the downbeat ending seems rather unearned, and Rose in particular comes off as a drab and repellent character.

The opening title, Harvey Landa’s “Why Norman Finklestein Doesn’t Call,” is slight and pat, the weakest of the four. An insecure young woman named Marcia (Jennifer Parsons) shows up at the door of a man (Richard Hoyt Miller) she believes she slept with years before. Her mission is to convince him to call her as promised the night of their tryst.

Landa could have provided an arresting look at men’s and women’s differing expectations of love and sex. Instead he settles for a conventional and routinely written romantic comedy, abbreviated to accommodate the format. Tobolowsky’s direction is lackluster.

* The 7th Annual One Act Festival, Theatre 40, 241 Moreno Drive, Beverly Hills. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Feb. 4. $10. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes.